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Laurel Goodwin, an actor who made her movie debut at age 19 opposite Elvis Presley in the 1962 feature Girls! Girls! Girls! and four years later played a crew member in the original, failed Star Trek pilot starring Jeffery Hunter, died February 25. She was 79.

Her death was announced by her sister Maureen Scott. A cause was not disclosed.

Born in Wichita, Kansas, and relocating to California with her family during World War II, Goodwin studied drama at San Francisco State University and was soon signed to a contract with Paramount Pictures. She debuted in Girls! Girls! Girls! as one of two potential love interests for Presley’s character (the other was portrayed by Stella Stevens).

The following year, Goodwin played a daughter of Jackie Gleason’s railroad executive in the comedy Papa’s Delicate Condition.

Over the next decade, Goodwin would appear in numerous TV series, including The Virginian, Get Smart!, The Beverly Hillbillies,...

By Lee Pfeiffer 

Scorpion has released the complete version of the 3-part 1978 mini series "The Dain Curse" as a double DVD set. The show has a checkered history in terms of home video. A truncated version was available for a while on VHS, then Image released the full three episodes on DVD. Now Scorpion has done the same and the quality of the set is very good, capturing the relatively rich production values of the series. Those of us of a certain age can remember when the major networks put a great deal of time, talent and financial resources into mini-series. In the 1970s and 1980s, many of these shows constituted "must-see" TV. In an age in which the average household didn't have video recorders, some shows were so special that people altered their lifestyles to ensure they could catch each episode. Today, those days seem long gone, with network...

I looked for him, but he was gone. I checked the boozy dives and the greasy spoons and the street corners where the not-nice girls hang out.

Nothing.

He was gone.

Tall guy, fedora, trench coat. You must’ve seen him. Usually smoking. He was always hanging around, poking his nose where it didn’t belong and usually getting it punched.

A real wisenheimer, too, always cracking wise.

You see him, you call. And if I find out you’ve been holding back…

If you don’t miss that kind of patois, you’re either too young to remember it, or you’ve got a tin ear. God knows, I miss it.

Back in May, some of you might remember I interviewed Road to Perdition author Max Allan Collins (http://www.soundonsight.org/max-allan-collins-road-to-perdition-on-carrying-on-mickey-spillanes-legacy/). A lot of the discussion had to do with his connection with one of the giants of private eye fiction,...

Billing itself (with more than a little justification, too) as "the world's most popular film noir festival," Noir City opens today in San Francisco and runs through January 29. The star of this tenth edition, as Matt Sussman notes in his overview for the Bay Guardian, will be "Angie Dickinson, who will be feted and interviewed in person at a double bill of two of her best: The Killers (1964) and Point Blank (1967). Whereas Ava Gardner simmered her way through Robert Siodmak's 1946 adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's short story, the temperature of Dickinson's Killers mob girl is harder to take in Don Siegel's remarkably brutal remake: a Monroe in harsher lines with nothing of the little girl lost about her. So too in Point Blank — which re-teams Dickinson with her Killers costar Lee Marvin — does she put up a good fight, even as she brandishes her sexuality like a semi-automatic.

British actress Jean Simmons earned an Oscar nomination early in her career for her portrayal of Ophelia in Laurence Olivier’s 1948 production of Hamlet. Years later she starred as Elizabeth Collins Stoddard in the 1991 remake of the Gothic horror soap opera Dark Shadows.

Simmons was born in Crouch Hill, London, England, on January 31, 1929. She began studying dance in the early 1940s, and made her film debut in 1944. She made an impression as Estrella, the spoiled young lady, in David Lean’s 1946 film adaptation of Dickens’ Great Expectation, and her performance in Hamlet (1948) established her as a star.

Simmons continued her career as the passionate slave girl Kanchi in 1947’s Black Narcissus, and was Caroline Ruthyn in the 1947 Gothic horror Uncle Silas (aka The Inheritance). She starred in the 1952 screen adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s Androcles and the Lion with Alan Young and Victor Mature, and co-starred with Richard Burton...